Nobody knows but Jesus

Bryan Stanley Johnson- British Exprimental Fiction Writer

Essay



Nobody knows but Jesus…

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen

Nobody knows but Jesus…

Louis Armstrong

It’s true, truth is stranger than fiction and the delineation of this strangeness is pushing non-fiction sales up to the top of the charts. It could even be that fiction, in its pristine make-it-all-up glory, is a little winded. In trying to keep up with the innovations of television, film and the internet, fiction may indeed be grateful to sink into the comfort of the park bench - to sit out a round or two in contemplation. Besides, never mind categorisation, the King of de Carnaval in 2005 has to be King Idea, fecund as rain, impregnating everything comely, fathering more children every time he twitches. Genres today are running after ideas like a bunch of flabbergasted mix n match mammies trying to keep their wards safe, if hyphenated. Last year’s runaway bestseller, Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is what, fact or fiction or a bit of both? Does anyone really care? The idea is to be interesting and fresh in the rendering and so the market is flooded with novelised biographies, novelised histories and novelised management books, even anecdotal cookbooks – the mainstay of publishing outside of prescribed text books and pornography.

It’s also true that startling new ideas, left to marinade in the crucible of time, seem to age and mature, migrating from the preposterous to the pleasurable. But of course, it is not the ideas which change, little by little, ageing in the barrel like whisky and wine, imperceptibly transformed in the fullness of time. Ideas once stated can be as static as tombstones. They are strangely elliptical in shape, neither round enough to roll, nor possessed of the legs to walk by themselves. Heady they may well be, brewed with awesome innovation, but no longer at liberty to breathe gently in the gloom of cool cellars, properly absorbing the goodness of their ingredients, because now, like newborn babies, they have been cast out of the womb.

Ideas once born need succour, care, appreciation, protection. In time, ideas need advocates and successors. Ideas need you and I, from the start and at the end, the poignant beginning of their mutation. So it is fitting that we change our minds sometimes about sharp ideas, too tart to be tasty at first, we look on them differently when we gain a mellowness of perspective over time. The erstwhile avant-garde no longer offends, as it did a previous generation. Decades, sometimes centuries later, we sometimes redeem ourselves. On these blessed occasions, rare as heart’s blood for all that, we can raise that which was thought bizarre earlier, by the shoulders, with honour, raise it from the fringes and place it squarely in the mainstream. We can regard it well now, discovering things to admire and appreciate in its features. This is a bittersweet communion, as old as history, allowing us to beatify and exalt that which our predecessors have rejected, sometimes deliberately harmed. That irony and cliché walk hand in hand does nothing to faze us because we can feel none of the pain of the people who gave birth to those ideas that took so long to gain legitimacy.

The fathers and mothers of this race of novelty come in a variety as diverse as the ideas they extol. Some are noble of brow, archetypical - heroic, lonely, proud, self-absorbed-others, even as they contain the spark of genius are also branded by the mark of Cain. These latter are fragmented, tortured, inadequate vessels for their talent, venting their spleen in chicanery and epistolary beggary. Some are celebrated for a brief season before their audiences tire of them. Others spend years of soul-searing struggle to attain their measure of success. Either way, this is an audacious breed, not hesitant to climb on to the rack of popular judgement, seeking the edge in their daring, tacitly prepared for martyrdom from the very start. They are willing, they believe self-indulgently, to endure insults, ridicule, the pain of neglect, poverty and despair. But too often, the part of the prophet is too much to bear and there comes a time when death appears mesmerizing, its embrace sweeter than the most tender of lovers, guaranteeing oblivion.

Take the story of Bryan Stanley Johnson which is exciting quite a bit of comment at present because of the BBC Four’s Samuel Johnson Prize. The Samuel Johnson is the UK's and the world’s richest prize for non-fiction, with the winner receiving £30,000. Named in honour of the critic, essayist, lexicographer, poet and biographer Samuel Johnson, the prize is funded by an anonymous British businessman and open to any work of non-fiction published in English in the UK, regardless of the author's nationality. Set up in 1999 following the demise of the NCR Book Award, the 2005 prize, announced in mid-June, went to a conventional novelist named Jonathan Coe who has written a novelised biography, Like a Fiery Elephant: the story of BS Johnson.

The subject, Bryan Stanley Johnson, is viewed by Coe, and by the literary establishment by virtue of the bestowal of this most prestigious prize, today in 2005, as a gifted and prolific novelist, poet, playwright and filmmaker, whom Coe describes as "Britain's one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s". Johnson’s relentless pursuit of re-invention and innovation despite an icy neglect from the public drove him to suicide in 1973 at the age of 40. The irony is doubly compounded by the fact that Johnson was not without support in his lifetime, being acclaimed by fellow avant garde writers Samuel Beckett and Anthony Burgess and championed by literary agent extraordinaire, the late Giles Gordon (who also represented Prince Charles and our own Vikram Seth). Whatever be the peculiar alchemy of Johnson’s destiny, that seems to be reaching out beyond the grave some 30 years on, in his time, the experimentation and anarchic playfulness that characterised his fiction and a small body of short films and documentaries for cinema and television, was not seen as refreshing.

Johnson didn’t let the disapproval stop him–he wrote, and at a furious pace: Travelling People-novel, (1962), Albert Angelo-novel, (1964), Statement Against Corpses – poetry, (1964), Trawl-novel, (1967), You’re Human Like The Rest of Them-novel, (1967), The Unfortunates - novel, (1968) Paradigm- novel, (1969), Unfair- novel, (1970), Fat Man On a Beach, novel, (1970), B. S. Johnson v. God - play, (1971), House Mother Normal-novel, (1971),Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry-novel,(1973), Aren't you a Bit Young to be Writing your Memoirs? -non-fiction, (1973); and, published posthumously, See the Old Lady Decently - novel, (1975). Almost everything BS Johnson wrote is unavailable and has been long out-of-print but let us see what happens now.

Johnson earned a B.A. from King's College, London, was poetry editor of the Transatlantic Review, worked in film and TV and even won two awards, the Gregory Award (1962) and the Somerset Maugham Award (1967). He displayed his penchant for the bizarre, Yoko Ono like, offering his books with holes cut into them, others with blackened pages and unbound books that could be read in any sequence. These attention-grabbing antics might have produced love and loathing, in equal measure, if it had been Johnson’s fate to be indulged, but sadly, it did neither, at least while he lived. Today, after being reprised by a man whose writing is nothing like his subject’s, a writer from another era (born in 1961), who has applauded his efforts without reservation, calling his experimentation with the novel, its form and content, profound: Brian Stanley Johnson is famous at last.

“... Jack calls me, from the liver-house, Jack who keeps interesting things for me, curiosities which turn up in the trawl. Today he has a dogfish, the only one caught so far, stiff and bent rigorously by the shape of the bucket it has lain in, about two pounds in weight, looking just like a baby shark, vicious enough for its size.... Jack shows me at the bottom of the bucket the brown flatness, flecked with orange spots, of a plaice. As he puts his hand in, the plaice flaps twice before he can hold it through the gills: looking at me as though about to reveal a secret, he suddenly reverses the fish to show that the bottom two fillets have been cut away. That's what 1 like about plaice, Jack says, They do keep trying.” (From Trawl, BS Johnson, 1967).

(1,411 words)

Title: Nobody knows but Jesus
By Ghatotkach
Saturday 25th June 2005